A transdisciplinary approach to structure knowledge gathering on organic farming systems: evaluation of organic farm strategies in the case of Flanders: evaluation of organic farm strategies in the case of Flanders

Decision making or adapting farm strategies to environmental and social demandson organic farms faces specific fundamental problems. First, gathering of farm specific data and knowledge is limited due to the small number of farms within each production type. Second, the diversity of organic farms causes difficulties in comparing these individual data. Moreover, as processes on organic farms are more complex and less controlled than on conventional ones, strategy design at farm level needs to account for this specificity and complexity. These problems call for new ways of structuring farming system knowledge for strategy design and strategic choices.Literature provides two key issues in overcoming these problems. First, a system approachdelivers tools to understand the complex interactions within and between farming systems (Darnhoferet al., 2012).Second, a transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge is recommended and includes societal actors in the knowledge co-production process (Aeberhard & Rist, 2009). Such an approach should be able to assemble the needed expert and tacit knowledge from different stakeholder groups (farmer, advisors, farm networks, research and educational institutions).As a result, this paper aims to contribute to the aforementioned shortcomings by describing a transdisciplinary and system approach to structure knowledge for strategic choices in organic farming.